Circular reasoning

I find fascinating, if occasionally uncomfortable, the ability of people to ruminate on difficult situations almost endlessly. I'm going to have to go through a series of difficult conversations with people in the next few weeks and what I need to say circles my brain like a hamster on a wheel, although maybe slightly more squeakily.

Why is this? I know what I need to say, but I keep going over it again and again. What in the evolutionary process made this a human characteristic? Why would people who did this survive and those who don't die off? It would seem that a distracted being is not the one best suited to survive.

Sometimes I've been able to stop this kind of stuff by writing it down, which I might try this time as well, but what's more interesting to me here is the way I'm coping with it. Yes, I know I'm writing about myself as if it's not me, but I don't presume to have much if any control over all of this, it's just happening. For better or worse, my mind has begun to frame what's happening currently and in my future life as a familiar story, where, aside from a few details here or there, I know exactly what will happen and how it will all end.

Of course things, and especially difficult conversation things, rarely go the way you expect them to, but it doesn't matter. Stuff will happen. Some of it will be fine and some of it will be hard. But people have their own identities, which creates a powerful inertia in a person's life, so for the most part, with only calamitous sorts of events to the contrary, things go where they're headed, no matter what you do about them.